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One imagines Mike Rogers has enjoyed a lovely Michigan summer. The GOP Senate candidate was uncontested in his primary for his second straight run, after only narrowly losing to Sen. Elissa Slotkin in 2024. Rogers watched from a distance as Democratic primary candidates Abdul El-Sayed and Haley Stevens took hacksaws to each other under a national spotlight. The Republican has been little more than a hazy object on the horizon for Democrats, a reward, for better or worse, for having survived the hell on earth of the primary.

So who is Mike Rogers?

First and foremost, he is not the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee—that is Alabama Rep. Mike Rogers. Nor is he former National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers. It’s simply a popular name among bigwigs in the military-intelligence community.

Michigan Mike Rogers is a bit of a throwback to the pre-Trump GOP: a buttoned-up, country-club Republican from the George W. Bush era. A former FBI special agent, Rogers was elected to the House of Representatives in 2000. He spent his seven terms voting for usual conservative economic policies (tax cuts, deregulation) while maintaining hawkish foreign policy views. He made his biggest mark as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee from 2011 to 2015 and was a strong supporter of post-9/11 surveillance programs. During the Edward Snowden leak in 2013, he was effectively the public face of the intelligence community defending against Snowden’s revelations.

He was, in short, the sort of member that House Republican leaders liked to send as an ambassador to Meet the Press. He could show the public that........

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